At a relatively arbitrary date, October 31, 2011 at a relatively arbitrary time of 11:58 PM in Manila in the Phillipines (near the International Dateline), a relatively arbitrary baby (Danica May Camacho) was born – the seven billionth person alive on Earth. That is according to the United Nations Population Fund. The U.S. Census Bureau begs to disagree, saying that seven billion won’t be reached until March, 2012. There are many other estimates.

Obviously human beings can’t agree on anything important. I’m sure there are those who deny there are seven billion people on Earth for no particular reason other than its easy to deny something and force others to prove them wrong – which in this case they can’t, because they can’t agree on the answer.

Meanwhile the population of the Earth continues to grow, on its way toward a probable ten billion or so by the end of the century. Is that too many people? There’s no agreement on that either. Mind you, I’m not complaining about the lack of agreement. If we can’t agree on trivial things, I don’t expect agreement on really big things. In fact, the bigger it is, the less likely we are to agree.

Not that it’s necessary or even desirable to agree about everthing; although it would be beneficial if we could agree about things involving the fate of the Earth like global warming, overpopulation and nuclear holocaust. Don’t you agree?